tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-315143752015-09-16T15:21:49.489-07:00BookcrackerA blog about books and writingBabette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-6234166425448938542010-03-03T14:27:00.000-08:002010-03-03T14:31:03.191-08:00MigrationIf anyone is still checking out this blog, I've migrated the posts to a new blog called The Book in the Drawer, http://bookcracker.blogspot.com<br /><br />New posts will go there and focus on my efforts this year to balance my day job with book writing. I have a novel that I'm going to try to have published, so come along and see how it works. Or not.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-61479097979701004512009-01-25T10:13:00.000-08:002009-01-25T10:37:48.677-08:00Good or BadI've just finished reading John LeCarre's <strong>A Most Wanted Man</strong>, which I really enjoyed. At the same time, I've been re-reading Leon Hale's <strong>Bonney's Place</strong>. Two more different books would be hard to find. Yet...the subject matter is the same. Let me explain. <br /><br />In the Le Carre thriller, the Muslim target is a public figure whose charitable contributions are said to be 95% "good" and only 5% "bad." The five percent relates to the money and goods siphoned off to fund terrorists. So the question becomes: is that five percent bad enough to cancel out the vast preponderance of good works? The Americans in this story think so. And so (spoiler alert) he's basically toast.<br /><br />In <strong>Bonney's Place </strong>the question is whether a man who bilks an old man out of a considerable sum of money can possibly be anything other than "bad." This man also spotlights deer out of season, repeatedly cheats a pompous customer, slaughters the same customer's heifer and serves it to the poor people of his community, and performs other larcenies, here and there. At the same time, he takes in people who need help and performs many small acts of kindness in his community.<br /><br />It seems to me that our society has entered a time where many of our citizens desperately want clarity between actions that may be called good, or bad. But instead we find ever larger situations where the actions encompass both polarities. I'm thinking of things like how to treat people suspected of terrorism when they are arrested; and how we respond to suspicions of terrorist activities. There is no clear and immediate answer, and we grope toward an understanding of the boundaries we cannot allow ourselves to cross.<br /><br />Our new administration will be caught in the complexities of this process, but it may be able to handle it in a more satisfactory fashion than did its predecessor. Because of the value the president places on the pre-eminence of the rule of law, we have drawn a boundary for ourselves. That will help guide us, and possibly allow us to avoid the pitfalls of ideology.<br /><br />Without law, there is no civilization. When we must deal with nations and tribes who reject common understandings of law, including their own religious law, and we respond by doing the same, we abandon all concepts of civilization. I suggest that this constitutes another boundary for us. If we must abandon our civilization in order to prevail against the enemy, what have we achieved in the victory?Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-48412264832157030962008-12-13T02:29:00.000-08:002008-12-13T02:39:22.494-08:00Absent, Part I, Chap 1Part I – 2004<br /><br />August<br /><br />1.------Santa Fe, New Mexixo<br /><br />A cool morning at the café, with the door open and a long line of customers waiting to give their orders for coffee, chai, muffins. Emilie’s taking the orders, manning the cash register.<br /> <br />“Soy latte, please, 12 ounce,” comes a familiar voice. Emilie looks up from her order pad into the face of her high school best friend. Lorrie is staring at her with a look of amazement. “Emilie? Is that you? I don’t believe it.” <br /><br />Emilie doesn’t believe it, either, although recognition by someone was inevitable. Garcia Joe is a Santa Fe destination. Tourons—AKA tourists—love it. They feel authentic there, part of the real Santa Fe scene.<br /> <br />But, in a place like that where everybody’s studying the overhead menu and looking at the pastry case or each other, people don’t usually notice the server. Most of the people Emilie knows from Houston wouldn’t have seen past her surface appearance, anyway. She’d intended misdirection of this sort when she buzzed her head the previous spring. She has piercings, too, although she doesn’t remember how those happened. They’re residue from the void, the darkness, the time she was gone from herself.<br /> <br />“That’ll be two-seventy-five, please,” she says, trying for a neutral professional tone.<br /><br />Lorrie is frowning at her, though, holding up the line instead of paying and moving down the counter to pick up her drink. “Emilie, what are you doing here?” she asks. She sounds almost offended for some reason.<br /><br />“I can’t talk now,” Emilie says. Go away, she’s thinking. Just go away.<br /> <br />“I’ll wait for you,” Lorrie says. And for the next twenty minutes, Emilie can feel her old friend’s probing gaze as she goes about the motions of her job. Making stupid mistakes, too, as though her brain is so feeble it can’t handle two stresses at once, which is probably true.<br /><br />What on earth can she say to Lorrie? How can she begin to explain that she doesn’t know how she got to Santa Fe, how she found her job, even how she acquired the name she uses—Elly. She doesn’t remember leaving Houston. It’s as though the person who did those things had simply ceased to exist—but not completely, because in a way that person has been present ever since, standing somewhere just behind Emilie, perceptible the way you sense something wrong in a room before you see it. <br /><br />On break, at last, she leads Lorrie outside, to chairs at the far end of the garden where they will be separated from the other customers by shrubbery. Seated, Lorrie leans toward her eagerly, trying to engage. “So tell me, what’s going on with you? I thought you got married. Didn’t you have a kid, or something?” <br /><br />It seems to Emilie that the ground makes a little shudder beneath her feet. “I really don’t know what to say,” she tells Lorrie, and then she smiles. She hopes it is a warm and friendly smile. Over the past few months, Emilie has learned that if she arranges her face pleasantly and says as little as possible, the person across from her will fill in the conversational silences. So she sits there and waits for Lorrie to talk.<br /><br />In the next few minutes, she learns that Lorrie lives in Seattle, but loves Santa Fe so much she’s thinking of moving here. No husband anymore. No children. “Santa Fe is so beautiful,” Lorrie gushes, “the sunlight is fabulous. You’re so lucky.”<br /><br />At the moment, though, Emilie doesn’t feel lucky. That’s because she can hear the question grinding away beneath the surface of Lorrie’s chatter, the question she knows Lorrie is dying to ask. How could you have gone off and left your baby? It’s the big question, the one Emilie asks herself all the time, and can’t answer. <br />Instead, however, Lorrie’s absorbed in relating the details of her own calamities. She’s been married twice since college, imagine that, she says. Both men were lawyers, and she realizes now that all she really wanted out of them was the approval she never got from her dad. She never obtained it from them, either, it appears. At least that’s one mistake she won’t be making again any time soon. As Lorrie says this, her face droops momentarily into the expression it will wear in her forties. Just as quickly, though, she pastes the upbeat look back on.<br /><br />“Well,” she says, finally, and gets to her feet. “I’ve got an appointment to look at a condo over on Palace. Let’s have lunch one day soon, OK?”<br /><br />And after Lorrie’s gone, Emilie sits there alone for a few minutes, staring at the dry ground beneath a butterfly bush where a spindly Echinacea is struggling to push its head out into the sun. <br /><br />She has to go home. She has no choice any longer.<br /><br /><br />It’s been almost a year since Emilie began to regain a sense of herself in little bursts, the way that flares from a match in the dark reveal shapes of a tantalizing familiarity. And then, one afternoon she was on the Cerrillos Road bus, going to buy underwear at the mall, and suddenly the main things were all there—the fact she lived in Houston and had a husband; her name, too—Emilie—although, at first, his was still too slippery to grasp. She could feel the weight of his shoulders. She could see his eyes, the iris a light striated brown and gold. She remembers waiting for the warmth that should rise to greet the thought of him, but it didn’t come.<br /> <br />Across the aisle and one seat forward, a woman was comforting a crying infant, patting his diapered bottom in a slow steady rhythm as they bounced along. Over the woman’s shoulder, Emilie watched the baby’s face, an especially round one, with perfectly round, dark eyes. A corona of sparse hair floated, lightly tethered to his smooth, perfect skull. He—or she—will be a redhead, Emilie thought. A sick feeling spread upward from her stomach, then, as she realized she, too, had a child.<br /><br />Her heart had seized painfully at the remembered weight of her baby slumping in trust against her breasts, the milky sweetness of breath, his silken skin…She had to think of something else. Across from her, the baby’s soft mouth made little sucking sounds, his tongue working behind plump roseate lips, slightly parted, glistening with saliva. That’s when Emilie’s stomach flipped and she vomited onto the floor of the bus the Coke she didn’t remember drinking. There had been nothing else inside her to lose.<br /><br />She should have gone back to Houston, right then. She should have done something active to find out what had happened, instead of just continuing to drift. Why didn’t she? She was afraid, mainly. She knew she couldn’t have left her son easily. There had to be serious reasons why she was there in New Mexico while her baby remained in Texas. Something really bad must have happened. Could she have hurt him? <br />The horror of this thought trapped her. She needed to know, and she was terrified of knowing. The result was paralysis. Be patient, she told herself. Eventually everything will clear, like one of those low early clouds that dissolve into the Sangres with the climbing of the sun.<br /> <br />Except it hadn’t. Her lost weeks stayed lost, and she was left with the way she is now—when portions of what she thinks of as herself feel mostly normal; and others feel as though they’ve been erased, leaving only the sense of something missing. The absence of her son is a constant ache, a longing there is no way to satisfy.<br /><br />Just a few days before Lorrie turned up at the café, she hadn’t been able to stand it any longer. She’d borrowed a co-worker’s cell phone and called her own house. She’d drunk a second latte, triple shot, to get up the nerve. She picked late-morning when she was sure Paul would be at work. Standing on the café’s patio as far away from customers as possible, she’d dialed the familiar number.<br /> <br />She could see the phone ringing in what had been her kitchen. She could see Sylverta hurrying toward it. She would just ask if Doak was okay. That’s assuming she was able to speak around the large lump in her throat. Her heart thundered in her ears as the phone rang the fifth time, and then voicemail picked up—Paul’s voice, and in the background the sound of a small boy talking to their dog in a surprisingly audible tone. She dialed the number six times, just to hear him say: Shhh, Max. Daddy wants quiet.<br /><br />Doak, her son, is alive.<br /><br />She remembers that her legs gave way, then, dropping her onto one of the low tables recently cleared of coffee cups and empty plates. Her relief had been so profound, she felt disoriented, even less substantial than usual. But still she hadn’t gone home. It was as though Doak had been put on pause, captured there in the repeating voicemail, waiting safely for her, while she…what? <br /><br />Dithered, that’s what.<br /> <br />She knows it’s no excuse, but she’s made a life here—one without antecedents, without telling people where she went to college, where she came from originally, without looking for shared prior experiences to build communication around. She has a boyfriend, too—Tom—who seems perfectly happy to live in the present tense.<br />She hasn’t been straight with him, though. She’s never told him she has another name and home. She hasn’t said she was married, that she has a son. Being with him is so easy, she hasn’t wanted anything to disturb it—not at all the way she should feel—a married mother so far removed from her real life, her child.<br /> <br />Lorrie’s arrival, however, changes everything. Now that Lorrie knows where she is, everyone in Houston will find out. Everyone that matters, anyway. Emilie’s mother and Lorrie’s are good friends. She might as well announce it on Oprah.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-89501541743651216452008-12-10T10:51:00.000-08:002008-12-10T11:02:03.613-08:00Try thisHere's the prologue to Absent, the novel I've been working on. Comments are most welcome. The material is, of course, copyrighted.<br /><br />Prologue – Houston, 2002<br /><br />Emilie, half-waking, moans beneath the scrabbled bedclothes. Her protruding foot is cold and she retracts it, curling herself more tightly around one pillow. She pulls another pillow over her head.<br /><br />Even so, she hears a scraping sound, as Paul throws open the heavy drapes. “Get up,” he says. “Seriously, Emilie.”<br /><br />Brilliant light floods the room, and beneath her pillow, Emilie groans, burrowing in more resolutely.<br /><br />“Now.” And he yanks every one of the covers off, depositing them in a pile on the floor.<br /><br />“Pa-aul!” She tugs her nightshirt over her behind, as the air conditioning hits her warm skin.<br /><br />“You have to deal.” he says. He grasps her arm. “Come on, get moving. It will help. Trust me.”<br /><br />She sits up. She has to trust someone.<br /><br />His face, above the crisp white shirt and striped tie, is set, but the eyes are sorrowful. “All I’m asking is that you get out of the house today. Syl can give you her grocery list, if that’ll work. See if it doesn’t make you feel better.”<br /><br />He crouches down before her and tilts her chin up with one hand. “You can do that, now, can’t you, baby? Please?”<br /><br />“Okay,” she says, very softly.<br /><br /><br />After Paul leaves, Emilie drags over to their closet where, clad only in underwear, she stares at the clothing arrayed before her. Blouses, slacks, sweaters in neat little transparent boxes, skirted suits, formals, a wall of shoes. So many things.<br /> <br />Too many.<br /> <br />She closes her eyes, sticks out a hand and grabs in the direction of pants. Then blouses. She steps into the first, pulls the second over her head and slips her feet into flats. The pants are brown. The blouse is green. The shoes are red. She knows it will look odd, but she doesn’t care.<br /> <br />Once, before she had Doak, appearances mattered. She enjoyed putting together outfits suited to a particular impression she wanted to create. Even when she was pregnant, she’d combined maternity clothes with her existing wardrobe in ways that her friends found clever and original. She had intended to be that kind of mother, too, inventive, nurturing, competent. She had actually looked forward to motherhood, and for a time after Doak’s birth, she had acted like a normal, new mother—thunderstruck but functioning. She’s sure of that much, at least.<br /> <br />By Doak’s third month, though, she had felt herself beginning to dissolve around the edges. At first, it was just fatigue. She’d take a nap at noon. Then one in mid-morning, too. Then additional naps in the afternoon.<br /> <br />She started to get up later. She’d rouse herself, diaper Doak, feed him, stick him in the crib and go back to bed. Her mother, Isabelle, began to spend whole afternoons at the house, playing with Doak, reading to him. Most days she’d take him to the park, while Emilie vegetated. Eventually, when Emilie didn’t “snap out of it”—as Paul kept hoping—Isabelle found a woman who would look after Doak and the house, too—Sylverta Guidry, who in less than half a year has become indispensable.<br /> <br />Emilie returns to the bedroom and fishes around in a dresser drawer for a clip. Finding one, she quickly fastens her long loose hair back from her face. Out of the way.<br /><br />She sighs. <br /><br />Her feet feel heavy, propelling her down the hallway.<br /><br /><br />In the kitchen she slumps on a stool at the counter without speaking. Beside her, Doak gleefully mushes a piece of zwieback into a pool of milk on the tray of his high chair. Her stomach turns. She’s always been squeamish at breakfast, though—even as a child watching her father, late for work, eat toast hurriedly, never quite closing his mouth.<br /> <br />Sylverta slides a mug of steaming café au lait before her. Emilie downs it and holds out her mug for a refill. “Please?” she says. She’s hoping the strong coffee will break through her inertia.<br /> <br />Her son’s bright blond head is intent on the mess he’s making. She reaches out with the moistened edge of a paper napkin to wipe soggy crumbs from his perfect chin. He looks up, a little irritated at the interruption. She smiles at him. She knows what she should be feeling. At times a surge of love for him breaks over her with such intensity that she dissolves into the liquid warmth of it. At other times, like now, she feels only fatigue, and the weight of the obstacle they’ve placed before her. Shopping for groceries. Anyone can do it. Isn’t that the point?<br /><br />For a moment, Doak’s face acquires a studious expression and it becomes swiftly apparent that his diaper needs changing. “I’ll take him,” says Sylverta, sweeping the boy out of his chair. “I put the new car seat by the back door.” <br /><br />While Sylverta dangles Doak at arm’s length so he won’t leak on her immaculate lavender uniform, Emilie places her empty mug in the sink and begins to gather up baby paraphernalia. She stuffs diapers, juice, a couple of toys into the bag, hooks the bag over her arm and opens the door. Then she grips the new car seat with both hands and hoists it.<br /> <br />The Volvo is parked in the drive, outside the gate. She balances the car seat against one hip so she can open the rear door. The car seat is awkward and bulky, not heavy, but she’s relieved when it’s in place. She’s begun to strap it in when the phone rings, inside the house.<br /><br />“It’s Mr. McBride,” Sylverta calls from the patio.<br /> <br />“Can you put Doak in the car for me?” Emilie asks, returning to take the handset. They need one with better range. They need so many things—ordinary, practical objects like pillowslips and towels, some new everyday wine glasses. Just thinking about it exhausts her.<br /><br />“So you’re on the move,” Paul says in her ear. “Good girl. I’m sorry I won’t be home for dinner. We’ve got a partners’ thing I forgot about. Do I have a clean pink shirt?”<br /> <br />Pink shirt? Pink shirt for the partners? “Just a minute,” Emilie tells him. She walks—it feels like slow-motion—to the gate. “Syl, Mr. Mac wants to know if any of his pink shirts are clean.” <br /><br />Sylverta says something, but her head has disappeared into the Volvo’s rear seat and her voice is muffled.<br /> <br />“I’m sorry?”<br /> <br />Syl straightens. “Yes, ma’am. Hanging in his closet.”<br /><br />Emilie relays the information to Paul and as she retraces her steps toward the car she can hear Doak zooming his blue truck back and forth in the air. Rmmmm! Rmmmm!<br /> <br />She slips into the car and fires it up, while pink shirt, partners’ dinner continues to buzz in her ears. It’s his favorite color, the one he thinks makes him look especially good because it does, reflecting warmth up into his sallow face. But pink is an odd choice for the quarterly cigar fest that sends Paul home smashed on scotch and port. (Isn’t it too soon? Wasn’t there one a couple of weeks ago?) The firm’s senior members are white shirt men for the most part, or blue shirts with white collars and really gaudy braces. The peculiarity of his choice and her annoyance at the fact he can’t stay sober in that kind of situation, clatter against each other as she whizzes back down the drive. In the street, she accelerates, maybe a little too fast, and the houses stream by in a blur.<br /><br />Paul’s late getting home most nights now. Not that she can blame him, really, with an inert, sexless wife waiting for him. So, is he having an affair? This is the first time she’s let herself ask the question. And does she care? She should, but the idea feels curiously remote, as though it might be happening to someone she doesn’t know very well. That’s not at all the way she would expect it to feel, but then practically nothing, any more, feels the way it she thought it would.<br /><br />At the first stop sign, she glances in the mirror to make eye contact with her son, but his shining eyes aren’t there. No one’s there, where he should be.<br /> <br />Doak’s not there.<br /><br />Her heart erupts in arcs of white-hot panic. But he had been, hadn’t he? He’d been sitting back there in his car seat, playing with his truck. She didn’t imagine that, did she?<br /><br />Confusion rises cloud-like around her. She jumps out of the car, sees the unlatched rear door. Did he fall out? How? He’s not in the street, thank God. She whips the car into a U-turn and jams on the brakes as a cyclist in the intersection swerves up onto the grassy verge to keep from being struck.<br /> <br />At the curb in front of the house, she stomps the brake. The empty car seat is lying on its side in the grass. Sylverta sits under the little oak tree in the front yard, clasping Doak tightly to her. She raises her head to look at Emilie, and Emilie feels tissue tearing. Her heart is beating violently.<br /> <br />Doak’s head turns, too, and all the color drains out of the scene. One little arm reaches toward his mother, but he and Sylverta are already moving away. They’re receding quickly, flattening into two dimensions as they go, a picture that no longer contains any space where Emilie might fit.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-4567905512891577252008-12-08T16:47:00.000-08:002008-12-08T17:12:51.314-08:00Hello againI've let this blog languish for more than another year, while I worked on a novel. That novel is with an editor at the moment, so while I wait for some kind of response, I thought I'd check back in.<br /><br />I'm blogging also at <a href="http://winedaleporch.blogspot.com"><strong>WinedalePorchscape</strong></a>, but that's a general blog with photographs.<br /><br />A couple of quick notes on books:<br /><br /><strong>Cost</strong>, by Roxana Robinson -- I found this novel riveting and heartbreaking. She goes into the hearts and minds of each member of a family as they react to the news that one of their members is hooked on heroin.<br /><br /><strong>The Story of Edgar Sawtelle</strong>, by David Wroblewski (All first-timers should have such success.)-- This is a remarkable first novel, and one of the new crop that gives dogs a prominent role. There seems to be a trend in American letters toward narrators/protagonists who don't or can't speak, human and canine. In this one, the boy is mute for reasons no one can discern. <br /><br /><strong>The Art of Racing in the Rain</strong>, by Garth Stein -- And this is actually narrated by the dog, Enzo, a character I loved. He can't speak, but he is certainly voluble on the printed page. Frankly, this isn't nearly as well written as the other three, but if you love dogs... <br /><br /><strong>Netherland</strong>, by Joseph O'Neill -- This book has been receiving excellent reviews, but I didn't really engage on an emotional level. <br /><br />Only one of this quartet of worthy or diverting books has protagonists born outside the US. Most fiction lately seems to feature foreign locations, or subject, or characters--reflecting our increasing interest in global cultures, and increasing recognition of how much we are connected to them. I think these books are a little like sag paneer (spinach in cream): very good for you, no doubt, and delicious once in a while, but a little goes a long way.<br /><br />What has happened to the gonzo novelists? (Other than the fact they've mostly died.) What has happened to existential dread as a subject? Do we all keep ourselves so busy now that we've stopped caring?Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-37406486752123110672007-09-07T19:25:00.000-07:002007-09-07T19:28:41.573-07:00A fast yearI'm approaching a year without posting. Been writing something for the print world, a novel, archaic, old fashioned, rapidly approaching completion (to the point where I will never be able to stand to look at it again, no matter what happens...).<br /><br />Blogging is fun if you're read. Getting read is hard. Also, you have to be convinced that you have something to say, if not, you're (I'm) just typing.<br /><br />Maybe I'll start up again and just use this as a journal, for my own use.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-27294744935847569312006-09-17T08:19:00.000-07:002006-09-17T08:21:14.339-07:00Not no one.I'm thinking about something in a <a href="http://www.coldbacon.com"><strong>friend</strong></a>'s email to me night before last. A while back I mentioned to him that I realized that, most likely, no one at all will read my novel. He responded as follows: <br /><blockquote>>which no one at all will read.<br />but now I know that that is okay.<br />that that is not important.<br />well. let me change that. as long as one person reads. and enjoys. then it's worth it.<br />one is enough.<br />that's my new rule.</blockquote><br />That "one is enough" has been rolling around in my head ever since. I think it pretty well encapsulates the drive behind all efforts at putting words into public circulation. You're looking for the one person who will really *get* it. Contact. It's what we all need, especially bloggers, or we wouldn't be doing it, would we?<br /><br />If I knew that there would be only one, though, would the impetus I feel to write longer fiction die out? Die is the right word, here, because the effort is against mortality. We write books, I think, to grab a little piece of immortality. Something of our selves will endure beyond us between the covers of a book, or a journal, or a packet of letters to a loved one (the epistolary form can be as little as ordinary letters between mother and son, sisters--the unique authorial voice as clear there as in the finest work of art). <br /><br />Blogging is so different, though. It's all about connections right now. Twenty years from now is anyone you care about going to be able even to find all these digital words of ours? Aren't we spending time creating something even less enduring than our own fleshly selves?<br /><br />Now back to that comment: *one is enough.*<br /><br />Is it?Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-7762665238954882182006-09-17T07:31:00.000-07:002006-09-17T08:18:51.926-07:00Great AshesThis week I reviewed for my book club <a href="http://www.brazosbookstore.com"><strong>The Great Fire</strong></a> by Shirley Hazzard, which won the <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2003_shazzard.html"><strong>National Book Award</strong></a> three years ago. Almost unanimously my book club detested the title for the way it misleads the reader. (They were even more scathing about the jacket copy. A lot of them obtain books from the library--remember libraries?--and those have the hardcover jacket on them, swathed in plastic.)<br /><br />I had probably been similarly affected. The first time I read it, I found my enjoyment much compromised by the expectation I brought to the book that something like a great conflagration would actually happen. I kept worrying about it and withholding involvement with the characters for fear of referred pain. Silly me. (I know about metaphor, right?) <br /><br />The second time, however, I no longer expected vivid descriptions of Hiroshima or the Blitz and so I allowed myself to fall in love with the book. <br /><br />Almost everything in it, I warn you, happens in the background, at a remove, the way most (not all) of the great disasters of the world one lives in do. So the reader inhabits with the narrator and her protagonist, Aldred Leith, the charred aftermath of World War 2 with all the questions it raised about the future, some of which is now. <br /><br />The driver of this exquisite, leisurely-paced book is a love story between a 17 year old girl and a war hero in his early 30's, both bookish, idealized, but memorable. The author was married for a long time to a man twenty-odd years older than she. As a result, it is difficult not to view some of this story of intense longing for one's soul mate to the fact that she had lost her husband not long before she would have begun writing the book. (I imagine that an author who lavishes such attention on her prose and lets twenty years elapse between award-winning novels might write slowly.) <br /><br />Whatever. <br /><br />It is simply a wonderful novel. Highly recommended.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-71334816497503748692006-09-12T14:14:00.000-07:002006-09-12T14:40:38.466-07:00The Day AfterOh, that sounds portentous. Don't mean it to be. But it is September 12, at long last. A friend's birthday is today. She's so glad it's not yesterday. She says if it were yesterday, she'd change it. Always wanted to be a Leo, she says, also younger, so she'd push it to August 11, next year. We each deal with misery in a different way.<br /><br />The editor who's been looking at my novel sent back her comments this morning. She has an interesting workday, beginning (in Seattle) at dusk and going until dawn. So what's today for her? If it's still dark out, she counts 5 AM to be part of the night of the previous day. So I guess, for her, she sent me her comments on <a href="http://chaschesterfield.blogspot.com"><strong>Sept. 11</strong></a>. Does that change the way I think about them? (Of course not.)<br /><br />They were insightful, too. I haven't, it appears, written the Great World Novel, after all. She said it was beautifully written, that my writing reminds her of <a href="http://www.asbyatt.com/"><strong>A.S. Byatt</strong></a>, which is "good company" to be in. (Indeed, it is.) So the problem isn't the writing; just most everything else...<br /><br />Well, I exaggerate. She raised some issues a) that I believe a revision will resolve; and b) that need copious thinking about. These aren't really the same issues. Whether that's good or not, I don't yet know. What's equally interesting to me, however, is my reaction. On one hand, I'm dying to get started on that revision; on the other, I'm fighting depression over some of the elements she called into question. My plot, for instance--okay, part of it; also, my characters' failure actually to have lives, beyond their drive to work out the problems the peculiar plot has handed them. And then there's the fact that one of the characters is a writer. Apparently one can only have a character who's a writer if you've already published a book of fiction. She pointed out that this is the view of agents and editors. <br /><br />Well, shoot, honey. I figure I know as much about it as anyone who has published one book (the amount necessary for the agents/editors to accept a writer/character). I've been writing for, well, twenty years; I've lived with a much published writer for 25 years; I've edited a number of published writers; and my son is a writer. That's pretty much full Berlitz immersion, if you ask me.<br /><br />(Yes, I know that this sounds defensive, but it's not, really, since right now I plan to ignore that part of her criticism.) You have to know your work well enough to know what applies and what doesn't, it seems to me.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-64886615919141003172006-09-10T07:37:00.000-07:002006-09-10T08:25:55.608-07:00WorkshoppingWorkshop is a verb. You knew that. As in people <em>workshop </em>a story or poem or chunk of a novel. Who does this? And why?<br /><br />You've got the sensitive, thin skin of an artist and you think you need toughening. You have a manuscript that you secretly think is the best piece of fiction ever written and you're dying for someone else to read it and comment (oh, oh, sounds like a blog). So you sign up for a workshop. This will answer both requirements. Believe me. You'll discover that you've written something for which the highest and best use is lining the kitty box, and in the process of this discovery, you'll develop, well, not thick skin, exactly, but the kind of calluses that protect against blisters on the feet by supplanting their supperating agony with a material as impervious as leather.<br /><br />So, knowing all this--and being certain I haven't written the best piece of fiction since, um, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/gm/results.pperl?title_auth_isbn=Cloud+Atlas"><em><strong>Cloud Atlas</strong></em></a>--why have I signed up for a six week workshop? You think I am going to provide an answer here? You think I <em>have </em>an answer?<br /><br />Plus (there's always a plus, I find) you get to read the work in process of other people, strangers, you hope. I hope, at any rate, and therein lies a short tale.<br /><br />At the first meeting of this workshop last Wednesday, we all introduced ourselves. A pleasant group of five women and two men, one of whom is the leader, the prof, a published award-winning author. We hear each other's names, mostly first names, but surnames in a couple of cases. I expect unfamiliarity and that is what I get. Watch out for those expectations. <br /><br />I don't do well in groups. I took a year or so of group therapy during a crisis in my earlier life to learn to do better, but still, acute self-consciousness grips me. People react in two ways to this affliction, I've noticed. One is the person who will shrink back into her seat and try to become invisible. I've done that, but in general now, after much experience, I tend toward the opposite pole: I act out. I talk, that is. Although I've known for years this is grossly stupid, it still happens.<br /><br />So I have absolutely no idea what I said at the little meet-and-greet after introductions to each other and the workshop rules is over. I know I spoke to various people. I know what I said was lame (unfortunately, this is a given). I felt that I had misspoken, somehow (also often a given). To complicate matters further, my brain often takes a break in the proximity of food. <em>There are cookies within arms length, C-o-o-k-i-e-s. Huh? You asked me something? My name? Date of birth? Sorry.</em> (Munch.)<br /><br />Ah, well.<br /><br />When I got home, I was recounting the evening to my husband when, in putting together and speaking out loud the first and last names of the woman I'd been sitting beside I realized that it was the wife of a very prominent public official, coincidentally one I voted for and support and actually admire. She was the one I felt I had most misspoken to, as well. And this week, we are to critique her MS, a book for young adults (a genre with which I have less than zero familiarity, since it didn't exist when I was one).<br /><br />So why am I taking this workshop?Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-20289041533415596082006-09-07T20:54:00.000-07:002006-09-07T21:09:15.596-07:00BlogskimmingThat title sounds like something from a Scandinavian language, but it's what I've been doing today. I just started reading <a href="http://radioactive-girl.blogspot.com"><strong>Radioactive Girl</strong></a> and I like the few of her links that I've had time to check out. I liked this depressed guy, <a href="http://www.secondhandkarl.com"><strong>Karl</strong></a> whose blog is called Secondhand Tryptophan. Actually I'm kind of excited. I think I've been looking at blogging much too narrowly, just linking to publisher pages on books. I've been doing that publisher page thing, BTW, because I want to patronize my <a href="http://www.brazosbookstore.com"><strong>local independent bookstore</strong></a>, but I have a small financial stake in said store so I think it's not pure to link there on every book on the blog, and so on, and so on. <br /><br />Plus, the store's new website with online ordering isn't up yet, for a com/tragedy of basic ineptitude. OK, here's a scenario, I'm not saying for sure this is what happened, but think how you'd feel if it happened to you: new owners of store, new manager, inherited staff geek, a really nice guy. Main but not only job is to design and activate a new webpage with online ordering through Booksense. Say this is in June. Then say in late August he leaves for foreign parts, as expected, but he leaves no information on how to access the design work he did on the site, AND the site is still inactive. Would not massive gnashing of teeth ensue?<br /><br />This is why reading other people's blogs is so salutary. The above is a tiny toenail problem, not even of hangnail dimensions. Thanks to all for the perspective. Be well.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-73987328553599328812006-09-06T06:47:00.000-07:002006-09-06T06:58:27.653-07:00Carver ReduxAs I was, yes, alphabetizing my fiction books on Sunday, I came across Raymond Carver's <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679723059"><em><strong>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love</strong></em></a>. That title has always sent a little shiver of appreciation through me for early Carver's highly distilled conveyance of emotion. But alas (see Carving Carver, below)I had a different reaction on Sunday. I thought: ah, yes, and then immediately I wondered whether Gordon Lish had come up with that title.<br /><br />Well, damn. I guess I have the answer to my question, don't I? My feelings about Ray Carver's work have changed. I think I need to read <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679723691"><strong><em>Cathedral</em></strong></a> again.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-24845808700607768022006-09-04T07:05:00.000-07:002006-09-04T07:16:57.661-07:00Sorting BooksWe spent much of yesterday <a href="http://blogs.chron.com/leonhale/"><strong>sorting our books</strong></a>. Sorting is a partial euphemism, of course, because along with placement and grouping we had to make room. We're the kind of people who fill up their bookshelves, then start stacking books on top of the TV, the side tables, floor, chairs (temporarily, of course). One year we went off on a trip and when we came back one of our assistants had taken down all the shelved books, dusted them (thank you so much) and put them back in the order of size. My husband was aghast. Why would anyone do that? he asked more than once. I admit it did look strange: one shelf would run smallest to largest, left to right. A couple of shelves below that, the reverse.<br /><br />So here on Labor Day weekend we decided to fix it, and while fixing, to find a home for all those other books lying in stacks around us. We made good progress, too, although the job's not yet done. We arranged fiction in alphabetical order--just the books that really mean something to us. We’d had some of the books double stacked, since we were in a rush to unpack other things when we moved in, so in arranging them, I discovered old friends: A.S. Byatt’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679735908"><strong>Possession</strong></a>; <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375724428"><strong>The Stories of John Cheever</strong></a>; Mark Helprin’s <a href="http://www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpages/0156031132.asp"><strong>A Soldier of the Great War</strong></a>. I also discovered a copy of <a href="http://www.tilburyhouse.com/Maine%20Frames/me_omm_fr.html"><strong>One Man’s Meat</strong></a>, by E.B. White, which I had ordered a couple of weeks ago from my <a href="http://www.brazosbookstore.com"><strong>local independent bookstore</strong></a>.<br /><br />But that left non-fiction and I'm having the usual trouble I do with filing things that aren't electronic bits and bytes. There are too many options. You can't group by author successfully, because who remembers the name of the author of each biography? (Well, I don't.) Can’t group by title, either, because the title usually has nothing to do with the subject. (Exception: <a href="http://www.brazosbookstore.com"><strong>One Art</strong></a>, the Letters of Elizabeth Bishop). So that leaves either type (memoir, biography, belles-lettres) or you can group by subject. I have a lot of books on France, for instance, so they go together. I have a long shelf of poetry, which can be grouped within itself by alphabet. But then I have William Merwin's <a href="http://www.biblio.com/search.php?tid=0&auid=0&stage=1&author=W.S.+Merwin&title=Lost+Upland+The"><strong>The Lost Upland</strong></a>--stories of southwest France. So should that go with Merwin’s poems, or in a travel group. Or just on the French shelf? (This is what I picked, but it still distracts me, to see his name so far away from the poetry shelf.) I’m still struggling with this, but all the books are off the floor and we have about four and a half feet of shelf space left to receive the ones stacked in chairs.<br /><br />Happy Labor Day!Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-28495583733327461322006-09-02T10:20:00.000-07:002006-09-02T10:22:36.450-07:00This You Must ReadThis link is to a <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19131"><strong>review of several books</strong></a>. Even if you don't read one of them, read this review. Your grandchildren will thank you.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-23584792343622489312006-08-29T09:05:00.000-07:002006-08-29T10:03:05.951-07:00The Art of LosingYesterday I drove past a house I loved and lost a few years ago, and I was put in mind of Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet (<a href="http://www.fsgbooks.com/searchnn.htm"><strong>The Complete Poems 1927-1979</strong></a>). There are two of her poems that I have always found parts of replaying in my head at appropriate moments.<br /><br />One of those moments occurred yesterday, driving past this house and knowing that its fate in demolition prone Houston is certain, perhaps even as soon as this fall. I lived in this house longer than in any other. It’s where I raised my son, and frankly I thought I’d live there for the rest of my life. (Never mind why we sold it. There are many reasons why one sells something one ought to keep.)<br /><br />Passing by, I felt that sense of floating that seems so natural now in this city. Floating as in untethered to landmarks, as in moving through a space where one has expectations of surroundings that have vanished so completely they might never have existed. (And what is left in their place? For the most part, generic exurbia; or, in the case of houses, gigantic boxes, built on spec, that fill their lots, that endanger and usually kill the trees that give this city what charm it has, the trees that are the principal reason anyone would want to live here, given a choice.) <br /><br />When you float in this manner it is because you suddenly don’t know where you are—you might be anywhere in this city, state, country. And when you are anywhere, as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moviegoer"><strong>Walker Percy</strong></a> chronicles, you are nowhere.<br /><br />I have to be honest, here: part of the floating sensation probably derived from the adrenaline surge that accompanies anger at how powerless we are against the forces of development, and yes, greed. With global warming a fact that can be experienced each day of summer in Texas, why does anyone with fewer than eleven children need a 5000+ square foot house? With tall ceilings that gobble up airconditioning? When is peer pressure going to well up and sneer at the unbridled ego evidenced by such a house?<br /><br />But I digress.<br /><br />I’ve had occasion lately to visit a second loved house, no longer mine, in another city. In the case of both houses, the principal measure of loss has to do with the shock of nothing where a tree should be. The amputation from one’s expectation of familiarity when a tree has been removed registers as nothing less than a small piece of one’s self, torn away. Granted, a tiny piece, not like an arm or leg or anything, but the sting is felt. Most of the time, driving down a street, we experience these absences as merely disconcerting: something’s missing here, right? But unless we know the place very well, we don’t know what precisely it is that has disappeared. <br /><br />In Santa Fe, it was a Russian olive that had been removed, along with the rose bush (white, fragrant) that bloomed under the guest room window; in Houston, it is a grand, ancient water oak, not gone yet, but clearly sick. For countless years, I watched from the windows of my bedroom while its long-limbed branches divided the sky into slices of geometry; I watched squirrels flirt upon them; and in a hurricane I watched them twirl in the wind like the arms of an orchestra conductor, building to a crescendo in a much calmer place. It is a substantial tree even now, gnarled and worn, its trunk so broad it would take the armspan of at least three men to reach around it.<br /><br />The only good thing I can think of about not owning that house any more is that I won’t be the one who will have to call the tree surgeon to take it down.<br /><br />The poem lost houses puts me in mind of is Bishop’s <em>One Art</em>:<br /><br /><blockquote>The art of losing isn’t hard to master;<br />so many things seem filled with the intent<br />to be lost that their loss is no disaster.<br /><br />Lose something every day. Accept the fluster<br />of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.<br />The art of losing isn’t hard to master.<br /><br />Then practice losing farther, losing faster:<br />places and names, and where it was you meant<br />to travel. None of these will bring disaster.<br /><br />I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or <br />next-to-last, of three loved houses went.<br />The art of losing isn’t hard to master.<br /><br />I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,<br />some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.<br />I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.<br /><br />--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture<br /> I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident<br />the art of losing’s not too hard to master<br />though it may look like (<em>Write</em> it!) like disaster.</blockquote><br />What’s the other and truly great poem poem of hers that I love? Hint: it’s about a <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6705&poem=29370"><strong>fish</strong></a>.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1156705650711984632006-08-27T11:53:00.000-07:002006-08-27T12:07:30.746-07:00Elite Sub-literates?So we have a generation (at least) of top ranked high school and <a href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4142715.html"><strong>college grads who are sub-literate</strong></a>. Does it matter? Aren’t they busy as little fire ants blogging their hearts out? Or txt mssging? It’s all about communication, isn’t it?<br /><br />Of course it is. And these will be tomorrow’s members of Congress, the judiciary and, yes, a couple of them will be tomorrow’s presidents. (Inarticulate presidents are nothing new, after all.)<br /><br />The problem is, in those positions of leadership, they won’t be trying to communicate only with people exactly like themselves, not if the present push for globalization still has a globe to be concerned with. <em>(US wnts U 2 B gd to Ugnda.)</em> No, instead, we’ll have sub-literate international diplomats trying to express the position of the United States to people who do not have our best interests at heart,people who will have nuclear weapons, most likely, and itchy fingers just longing to teach America a big lesson. In a situation like that you want to express your position in the clearest possible words, leaving very little opportunity for the other side to insert its own meanings. <br /><br />The English language is particularly well suited to clarity and specificity of expression. This is one of its glories. We don’t have to rely on idiomatic images to suggest what we are trying to communicate. We have words that can express remarkable variations upon meaning, if we can train a generation of the sub-literates referred to in Michael Skube’s article (see link above) to know what they mean and how to use them.<br /><br />There’s more to this generational illiteracy than its diplomatic effect, of course. If you’ve ever tried to edit anyone’s prose, you’ll quickly see that imprecision of language often reflects imprecision of thought. We really don’t need a generation of muddy thinkers to go along with a generation of mushy talkers and writers.<br /><br />Who’s to blame? Why don’t they read? Rephrase: why don’t they read BOOKS? Easy answer: there’s so much easy distraction, <a href="http://www.netaddiction.com/whatis.htm"><strong>addictive distraction</strong></a>, available that they don’t take the time for it. <br /><br />But I don’t think the extent of the problem is explained only by the fact they don’t read books. Our culture is awash in fuzzy thinking and bad grammar shouted from every electronic podium. The teachers of our young people grew up in this culture, too, even if it wasn’t as highly developed as it is now. This is why you have “well-educated” thirty-year-olds who still think the house where the Browns live needs an apostrophe before the S; who think something happened to “he and I”, or to “her and I”. And who have no idea how to write an essay that makes use of dependent clauses.<br /><br />Here’s one way to approach the problem: teach the teachers to write, first. Require our high school teachers to write coherent essays on assigned subjects before letting them loose to teach “writing” to our kids. <br /><br />And don’t rely so much on giving them—teachers or students—<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strunk_and_White"><strong>The Elements of Style</strong></a> by Strunk and White (do they do this any more?); give them E.B. White’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/lifetimes/white-essays.html?_r=1&oref=slogin"><strong>essays</strong></a> to read, instead.<br /><br />Catching up to a reference from an earlier post—I did enjoy <a href="http://www.goodbookslately.com/recommendedbooks/books/threejunes.shtml"><strong>Three Junes</strong></a>. It’s a satisfying novel of the mysterious privacies unique to each generation. You’ll never know all your Mom’s secrets, nor she yours.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1156559490939878632006-08-25T19:17:00.000-07:002006-08-25T19:31:30.950-07:00Carving Carver?Trying to find out more about the two versions of A Small, Good Thing by Ray Carver, I learned almost too much. First, there were three versions, apparently, and two won awards. Also, there were multiple versions of other stories. And most surprising of all to me, but not apparently to many other people, the reason for the different versions wasn't a stylistic change of heart on the part of the author. Instead, it was a matter of editing, by an editor, namely Gordon Lish. <br /><br />Lish was the most famous editor of literary fiction in the seventies. He wielded considerable power, made names, etc. In editing Ray Carver, he apparently cut the early stories considerably. It's amazing what can be done by cutting. A famous example is the editing Ezra Pound did of TS Eliot's The Wasteland. Some people consider it created the voice of the poem. In the case of Carver, <a href="http://donswaim.com/nytimes.carverchronicles.html"><strong>Lish edited</strong></a> by cutting away until the voice we all think of as uniquely Carver's is revealed. He is said to have pared away detail and sentimentality until what was left was stark and strange. And utterly memorable, of course. Carver, as he gained confidence, allegedly argued against this, winning his freedom, so to speak, with the celebrated collection, Cathedral.<br /><br />So the final version of <a href="http://www.whitman.edu/english/carver/precision.html"><strong>A Small, Good Thing</strong></a> was really close to the first version, and the first well known version, The Bath--that is the spooky, minimalist one--is the product of Lish's editing.<br /><br />Does any of this matter as far as Carver's accomplishment goes? I'm thinking about this and may have more to say on it tomorrow.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1156515892460763312006-08-25T07:13:00.000-07:002006-08-25T07:24:52.503-07:00From Book to FilmIn Santa Fe the other day I picked up a short story collection by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Dubus"><strong>Andre Dubus</strong></a> called Separate Flights. The first story in there seemed a little familiar, although I knew I'd never read this collection before. "We Don't Live Here Anymore" is the title. May sound familiar to you, too, and that's because it was made into a film with Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, Laura Dern and Mark Ruffalo. As it happens, I had seen that movie, maybe on DVD, but reading the story (really a novella) I felt that I'd read it before, too. So I went onto Amazon and discovered that the novella has been published in a different edition--as part of a three novella collection under the title of that story. And the cover bears the photographs of the movie's stars. A tie-in.<br /><br />The sense of having read a short story before is kinda like deja vu. Unsettling, that is. The first time I ever noticed it was in a collection by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver"><strong>Ray Carver</strong></a>--except he had actually revised the story somewhat. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, anything that gave the world another Ray Carver short story is an action deserving praise; on the other hand, it would have been better for there to have been that many more actually new ones.<br /><br />There's a terrible temptation for an author to "improve" upon older work and authors deal with this temptation in different ways. Some just refuse to re-read the older pieces; some refuse to allow earlier, "inferior" work to be included in comprehensive collections; and some revise. Henry James revised entire novels, in fact, which may have been a stupendous undertaking, even for him.<br /><br />On the Dubus front, one more oddity: "<a href="http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1808436764&cf=info"><strong>The House of Sand and Fog</strong></a>" is attributed in many places to Andre Dubus, which <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375727345/102-3989824-9410521?v=glance&n=283155"><strong>it is</strong></a>, but it was written by his son who now uses the designation III, after his name. I can't think of any other American authors, father and son, both of whom have had good films made from their literary work. And yes, I make the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction. See comment below re: elitist B.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1156387336925863492006-08-23T19:42:00.000-07:002006-08-23T19:54:33.163-07:00Another view? Kathryn on...: Yuck<a href="http://kathrynon.blogspot.com/2006/08/yuck.html#links">Kathryn on...: Yuck</a><br /><blockquote>The people who spend hours and hours crafting their blog posts, pouring their heart and soul into making something they feel proud of... then whine and complain about why they don't have more readers, and how they don't understand why the flippant, silly girl with goofy pop culture-related posts has higher site traffic. Either you do it for yourself or for others, people. There's a reason a high-concept, high-quality magazine like Topic has so many fewer readers than shopping-crazy Lucky. The more esoteric and abstract your language and topics, the smaller your potential audience. Consider it a badge of honor.</blockquote><br /><br />Oh, I am so excited, she's talking about ME! Elitist B that I am. But, hey, she writes very well. It's a valid point of view. Shallow may be the only way to cope these days. Read ChickLit. (I'd cite a title if I could think of one.) Enjoy <em>The Devil Wears</em>...(that makes at least 2 devilish roles for Meryl Streep, what can blogdom pull out of that coincidence?) Maybe the best response is to fiddle away while the globe warms...it's been done before on a smaller scale. But, whoa, that's a reference to history, old white men in Europe-type history. We don't teach or read that any more, do we?Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1156257919777052042006-08-22T06:57:00.000-07:002006-08-23T00:13:53.216-07:00U Wanna Write?An <strong><a href="http://chaschesterfield.blogspot.com">interesting post</a></strong> I read last night excoriates the pretense of people who want to BE writers, as opposed to those who are driven to write. Of course there's a difference. One is fantasy; the other is major hard work. This is his point.<br /><br />He talks about attending a dinner party where everyone was praising a girl (who's had some media exposure) because she's "writing a journal", which would probably get no attention at all, if she hadn't had media exposure, but since she has experienced that magical immersion, will probably result in a book deal. Gnash, gnash. I, too, am continually finding new ways to be infuriated at our shallow, celebrity obsessed culture and the degree of attention it takes away from ME. <br /><br />I don't knock journals in general, though. Journaling can be a valuable tool, a resource for the serious writer, an <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465027288/sr=1-2/qid=1156256025/ref=sr_1_2/102-3989824-9410521?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books">art form</a></strong> on its own. But he's referring to the type of journaling that pretends that shallowness, the celebrity culture, have value in and of themselves--blogging, in other words. Not all blogging, to be sure, but maybe most? He excoriates the pretense involved--the pretense that it matters.<br /><br />I agree.<br /><br />Back in the seventies there were many references to the Boomer generation as the Me Generation. Of course, the present blossoming of ego on the internet dwarfs this to a power of about 100. It's all about feeling special, about the way that feeling, common to children, persists for an entire generation into adulthood, and indeed, into the beginnings, at least, of old age.<br /><br />So, can you blame anyone singled out by the white light of television for believing that there's something even more deeply special about them? Seems logical, almost. My question is why do the myriad of voices nattering away on the internet (including mine) feel that way? Why would anyone care about what most of them (us) have to say? What would make what they have to say different from what anyone else is thinking, when the references from which they formulate their thoughts are identical to what everyone else refers to? (Aha, there's where mine may differentiate a bit...)<br /><br />There are so few really original viewpoints in a civilization and I would argue that the blossoming of ego in blogdom--rather than allowing the real thing an opportunity to shine--actually snuffs it out with an onslaught of chatter. And the scale of the chatter, the enormity of the number of voices, attracts the serious attention of the mainstream media who still have the power to anoint. Why? Because our society, which we like to think of as complex, has devolved into a very simple thing after all: a society which values <em>counting</em> above everything else, above all culture, above all humain attainment. We attach an elevated monetary value to integers, 1,2,3, when there's a consuming body attached to each one.<br /><br />So where should that really original viewpoint (and it's not me, that's for sure) go for discovery? Thank your stars, or the generosity of trees, or the remaining tatters of the establishment, but there are still BOOKS, bro.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1156183968249156722006-08-21T11:09:00.000-07:002006-08-21T11:32:44.496-07:00Long time no postSorry I've been out of touch lately. I've been revising the first draft of a novel, trying to get it done before I have to leave this place. What place? The house outside the village of Tesuque belonging to two friends of ours. Tesuque is an agglomeration of houses along a creek near Santa Fe, surrounded by tall trees and a remarkable amount of vegetation considering the semi-arid conditions nearby--and especially the multi-year drouth northern New Mexico has been suffering. Did I mention that it's been raining every day we've been here? It was a wet Indian Market in Santa Fe yesterday and the day before. And a cool one. Amazing. (Of course, we didn't go this year. For why, see the second sentence above.)<br /><br />What makes this such a great place to work--other than the surrounding beauty and peace and clean air--is the fact that Tesuque is in a hole, a notch between foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains--the notch dug by the creek I mentioned earlier. So guess what? No cell phone connection. Our friends are away and we haven't been using their landline, and calls on it have been infrequent anyway, since all their friends know they're out of town. Pretty cool, huh?<br /><br />Of course, we do have internet. But mine isn't rigged up to push messages or other interruptions through. That way I can work without distraction. And I did. I revised a 377 page book is two weeks. How good the revision is, who knows? But if it's bad, the fault won't lie with technology.<br /><br />So now I've sent the MS out to a couple of first readers and I'll sit back and work hard on my real world job and wait for their comments. Do I have a publisher? Do I have an agent? No and no. Would you believe that I'm doing this for myself? For the adventure of finding out what the characters I've whomped up are doing with their lives, how they are coping with some very bad luck they've been handed (by me, darn it). But that's fiction, I guess.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1155249732600721932006-08-10T15:36:00.000-07:002006-08-10T15:50:06.603-07:00One Thing to Carry On<span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Now that all those electronic devices that we annoy each other with on airplanes are <strong><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060810/ap_on_re_us/terror_plot_the_new_threat">verboten</a></strong>, guess we’ll have to go back to books. Well, OKAY. (Not okay, actually, but more about that in a minute.)<br /><br />Seriously, folks, we need to hear from you on what you’re reading, or what you plan to read on your next airplane flight. This must be escapist. No tomes on the Middle East; no copies of the Quran, or however it’s being spelled these days; no “end times” books. It’s gotta be strong enough to carry you mentally away from the slim metal cylinder that your physical self will be traveling in. Gotta be able to make you forget just how fragile the skin of that cylinder is, and how very far away indeed is the ground and all those you love.<br /><br />Or, if you don’t want even to think about air travel right now, how about books for long car trips. Audiobooks. (Won’t be listening to any of those on the airplane, will we…or at least not on <strong><a href="http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060810/NEWS99/60810025">flights to Europe and back</a></strong>.)<br /><br />You want to know what I’d recommend? Oh, dear. I was afraid you’d ask. Do you ever find that when someone asks you what you’ve read lately, every title flees from memory? Or who’s your favorite author and every name except, maybe, Ernest Hemingway, departs?<br /><br />Well, here are a couple I’m working on, at present, so they’re sitting on the table beside me:<br /><br />Ruth Reichl’s <strong><a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780143036616,00.html">Garlic and Sapphires</a></strong>, the Gourmet magazine editor’s account of her years as the restaurant critic for the New York Times which seems to be at least as much about the variety of disguises she assumed as the food she ate. (At the very least it will whet your appetite for when you arrive at your destination.) You’ll be too busy giggling to pay much attention to where you are.<br /><br />Or <strong><a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385721424">Three Junes</a></strong>, by Julia Glass. Won the National Book Award a few years ago. I’ve just started this, but the voice is enveloping and the locales vary from Greece, to Scotland, Greenwich Village and Long Island (according to the back of the jacket). I’ll let you know later what I think.<br /><br />And now that I think about it, I particularly enjoyed living in New York before World War II with James Thurber’s <strong><a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060959715/The_Years_with_Ross/index.aspx">The Years with Ross</a></strong>. A funny thing about the New Yorker books—and there are enough of them to keep a person busy for months—each author is said by every other author to have invented most of the story. Well, this one will remind you how wonderful and eccentric human beings can be, when they’re not engaged in plotting physical mayhem upon each other.<br /><br />We will regain a world like that someday, won’t we?</span> </span>Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1155161394612937772006-08-09T14:36:00.000-07:002006-08-09T15:09:54.623-07:00Pucker UPThat strange expression you're seeing on your face when you look in the mirror is the taste of sour grapes. Not yours. It's coming from Connecticut, but the flavor is so pungent we all can taste it as though we were its source.<br /><br /><strong><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060809/ap_on_el_se/primary_elections_104">Lieberman</a></strong>. I can hardly think the word without puckering up.<br /><br />So he's going to run as an independent? Why should this surprise anyone? If countries act like none too bright ten year olds, why should we marvel when an old guy in politics does? He'll run as an independent, thinking he'll get those voters who supported him yesterday to vote for him again. Thinking, well, <em>I have a chance to win. </em><br /><br />Not, not, not. No chance, Lance.<br /><br />Even though he was a big vote getter in 2002, when he was also running for VP. His 63% of the vote then won't translate. Everything was different--I don't have to enumerate (but I will). In addition to the above, it was the election right after 9/11--remember the mood? Do you feel that way today? <br /><br />He'll get a few votes, sure. If he did amazingly well, he might get 30%, but that'll be enough. No, not to win. Just to put the Republican challenger into his Senate seat, if the Republican holds at 34%.<br /><br />Dumb, Joe. We all know you've gotta have an ego big as, well, Connecticut, to be in politics, but I did think better of you. I hoped a little <strong><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alec-baldwin/the-specialist_b_26666.html">Al Gore</a></strong> would have rubbed off.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1155157452113750922006-08-09T13:37:00.000-07:002006-08-09T14:13:40.786-07:00A Different HammerThis time it was voters who did the Hammering--<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6004061,00.html"><strong>Lieberman</strong></a>. News flash: the war isn't popular. My own random sampling confirms it (who needs elections for that, right?). Democrats do NOT like this war. They don't like the way it's caused us to be perceived by the rest of the world. We used to be the good guys...They don't like all the killing and they have a really hard time with it, but they're not thrilled with what Israel's doing, either.<br /><br />But I've got even more news for the White House: A lot of Republicans also don't like it. (Sort of like abortion: even the pro-choice people don't LIKE it. There are <a href="http://news.google.com/news?q=morning+after+pill&hl=en&lr=&sa=X&oi=news&ct=title"><strong>alternatives</strong></a>.) You know, folks, there aren't all that many neo-cons in the world, much less the GOP. You don't win elections with neo-cons. And there are a lot of Republicans who'll be voting for Democrats come election day. You watch. <br /><br />Oh, this is a blog about books. Right. Have you checked out <a href="http://www.brazosbookstore.com"><strong>The Looming Tower</strong></a> by Lawrence Wright? Front page review in last week's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/review/index.html"><strong>NYT</strong></a>. Educate thyself. Try <a href="http://www.simonsays.com/content/search_summary.cfm?string=Diplomacy&x=0&y=0"><strong>Diplomacy</strong></a> by Henry Kissinger for a history of the game seen through <strong><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik">Realpolitikal</a></strong> eyes.<br /><br />Then, go get yourself a nice big Maalox, and a glass of your favorite brew and try to feel hopeful.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31514375.post-1155076057070465552006-08-08T15:14:00.000-07:002006-08-08T15:27:37.083-07:00Tom Delay: Secret AgentWho has time to read a book when you can be following the larger than life, stranger than fiction saga of TD:SA? The Hammer ain't no secret, boys. But he's gonna be. He's gonna be a gee-whiz, all-fired Washington Lobbyist. And aren't they the biggest secrets of all, as they creep down the shrouded hallways, slip envelopes into pockets, and who knows what else? Heck, he's even gone and taken himself off the ballot for November. Who Hammered whom, there? Can you stand it? So, now, the question keeping me on the edge of my seat is: what tricks are they gonna pull to get that write-in candidate into Congress? Bring back Lyndon, that's what I say.Babette Fraser Halehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16801971149305731956noreply@blogger.com0